Data source: Gina A. Zurlo and Todd M. Johnson, eds., World Christian Database (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2024).
| Glossary item | Definition |
|---|---|
| agnostics | Persons who claim no religion or claim that it is not possible to know if God, gods, or the supernatural exist. |
| agnostics | Persons professing no religion, no interest in religion; secularists, materialists; agnostics, but not militantly antireligious or atheists. (Formerly termed "nonreligious") |
| agricultural land | In FAO usage, arable land, land under permanent crops, permanent meadows and pastures. |
| agricultural missions | See rural missions. |
| ahimsa | (Sanskrit). In Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, the doctrine of non-violence, or refraining from harming others including animals and insects. |
| Ahmadis | Followers of the Ahmadiya movement (qv). |
| Ahmadiya | (Ahmadiyah, Ahmadiyya). Ex-Shia Muslim messianic movement, pronounced heretical by Pakistan, following 1889 founder Ghulam Ahmad. |
| aid and relief | At least 360 major Christian organizations are at work in this field. |
| Alabare | (Spanish: ‘I will praise’). A theme song of Latin American Catholic charismatics |
| Aladura | (Yoruba: People who pray). African indigenous tradition across West Africa, with 3 million adherents. |
| Alawites | Followers of Alawiya, a sect of Shia Islam in Latakia province, Syria, Lebanon and Cilicia (Turkey), also called Nusayris. |
| Albanian | A European ethnolinguistic family and people. |
| Albanian/Greek | An Eastern Orthodox liturgical tradition dating back to the Apostolic era. |
| Alexandria | One of the 4 earliest patriarchates in the early Church, still the see city of 4 rival patriarchates and patriarchs: Coptic Orthodox, Coptic Catholic, Melkite and Greek Orthodox. |
| Alexandrian | The Alexandrian or Egyptian rite of the Catholic Church consists of 2 sub-rites: Coptic, and Ethiopic (qv). |
| alien | A person of another family, race or place; stranger, foreigner. |
| alien Christian scale | Referring to a a specific people or other segment, this is a computed scale from 0-10 measuring culturally alien (non-indigenous) Christian and evangelistic influence on the people by estimating the number of Christians from other cultures who reside on its territory. |
| alien Christians | Christians who reside in or work on the territory of a different culture. |
| Altaic | An Asian ethnolinguistic family. |
| altered states of consciousness | Religious experiences of a particular intensity, especially ecstatic states, trance, or dissociation; a category of psychobiological phenomena, amenable to observation and other objective methods of study; including spirit possession, soul loss, ecstatic religious behavior, faith-healing, mysticism, glossolalia, occult, shouting, visions, et alia. |
| alternate future | A range of 2 or more future scenarios depicting possible future developments by means of trends and statistics, ranging from optimistic to pessimistic and covering all possible eventualities. |
| alternative futures | Two or more alternative scenarios or possibilities or probable futures of a given present situation, based on current trends. |
| alternative media | In contrast to the mass media, small-scale participatory media, including drama, live theatre, dance, opera, ballet, wall newspapers (community-produced), etc. |
| alternative reality tradition | Term for the alternative view and experience of reality provided by modern Western cults of monistic/mystic/occult/shamanistic type (e.g. Theosophy, Rosicrucianism), as contrasted with the mainstream Western/European/Hebrew-Greek/normative scientific worldview of the Judeo-Christian tradition. |
| amateur radio | Operating of radio sets as a pastime rather than as a profession. |
Data on 18 categories of religion, including non-religious, by country, province, and people.
Data on all religions, Christian activities, and trends.
Membership data, year begun, and rates of change.
Population and religion data on all major cities & provinces.
Detailed information covering religion, culture, and geography.
A repository of historical data, including a chronology of Christianity from the 1st to 21st centuries.